Archive for The Gathering Place "The Gathering Place" is a web community where people can gather and make new friends, share ideas, enjoy a few laughs and learn about many interesting things together. It is a safe place where friends can correspond with each other about what they love.

Flower Photos: Honey Plants
With this web page, they attempt to provide a little information about some of the most important honey plants in North America. This list is not intended to be an exhaustive nor definitive description of our pollen and nectar sources, but rather it may provide a bit of background to folks wondering about the types of flowers honey bees work. They have divided their selections into the four seasons found in most of North America...

Aloe
My grandpap raised bees. I was really young when he got rid of them so I don't remember much except the white bee boxes in the orchard that I was told to stay away from. And I actually did!

Elena
My uncle raised them too and I just loved it when they got the honey from the combs and ran it through the thing that separated the honey from the combs. I never liked to chew the wax like some people did but I loved the fresh honey. Wonderful on hot biscuits in the morning.

I've always wanted to do it, but I'm not allowed to where we are-too populated.

I'm always at the roadside stands, tho. Getting stocked up on my favorite-wildflower honey-for the winter

Elena
It is interesting to experiment with the different honey varieties which are caused by the availability of the different kinds of wildflowers. It really does make a huge difference in the taste of the different varieties.

shazbot3
Also, they say if you eat honey made from wildflowers in your area, you'll build up a tolerance to allergy-causing pollens from them. I guess I don't eat enough of the honey to make a difference, tho. My allergies run VERY high every spring!

Elena
I need to break out the honey then cause my allergies are going wild.

Aloe
We've been having bee problems this year. About a month ago they started building a hive in the wall of the house. DH filled up the holes where they were getting in and that was the end of that. Then the other day they were starting to make a hive under the lid of the compost bin. Within 24 hours they had made a honeycomb a little smaller than a slice of bread. They hadn't put any honey in it yet.

Elena
Maybe you need to put out a sign saying, "No Bees Please" and they will probably go elsewhere. LOL!

They can be a real problem in the walls of old houses, from what I hear. Since the hive can only have one queen, when the new queens lead swarms away from the hive, I guess they head for the best bee friendly place they can find. You must have beekeepers in your area.

Aloe
I've wondered if someone has a hive around here. No one has more than 1/3 acre, so you couldn't have much of an operation, but one hive may be enough for one family. The bees are very tame. I basically tore their place apart when I took the lid off the compost pile and they didn't attack me.

I was told that you want to get the honeycomb out of the house walls because it will start to stink if the bees aren't there to maintain it, but we haven't had any problem. Maybe here, something like that will dry up, rather than rot away. I can just imagine the surprise of someone some day when this house is torn down or remodeled and he comes upon a honeycomb in the wall.

By the way, just in case someone didn't know, honeybees are native to the Old World. North America and South America have other native bees, but they aren't the honey producers that honeybees are. The vast majority of orchard trees and honey crops like alfalfa and clover are also native to the Old World. Native American crops like squash and tomatoes originally would have been pollinated by native bees and beetles. Often when nonnative species are introduced, it upsets the balance of nature, but I've never heard that said about honeybees. You can never have too much pollination, I guess.

Elena
Thanks for the additional info, Aloe. There are wild bee hives too so there wouldn't necessarily have to be beekeepers in the area. I just thought that might be a possibility since you are having so much trouble. I can remember the old timers telling about lots of incidences of bees making hives in the walls of old homes. Often they were able to retrieve the honey. Also I heard lots of tales of them robbing wild bee hives in the woods.

Aloe
Wherever the bees came from, it's strange that they found our place twice in one year. (Is it because I'm so sweet? Umm...uh...no... LOL) They haven't even found our hollow tree yet, but apparently bees will build just about anywhere. There's a story in the Bible of Sampson finding a bee hive in a lion carcass.

Aloe

The bees found our compost bin again this year. This time, they hadn't started to build a honeycomb and we just kept the lid off of the bin for a few days and they went somewhere else.